According to its organisers, fmx/07, the 12th International Conference on Animation, Effects, Realtime and Content, recorded higher attendance than the previous year and its largest international share to date. The conference ended late on Friday at Stuttgart’s Haus der Wirtschaft. Organisers reported around 6,000 participants, up from 5,000 in 2006, with more than 40 percent coming from outside Germany. On Thursday they had still expected attendance to fall. Students made up one third of the audience and industry visitors two thirds.
The organisers attributed the growth to the event’s international profile and its use of English as the conference language. They described fmx as an established key European event.
fmx/07 covered the creation, production and distribution of digital imagery across cinema, television, games and mobile entertainment through numerous presentations, panels and workshops. More than 300 sessions ran in as many as 11 rooms at the same time, demanding careful planning from visitors.
The conference’s recruitment panels attracted an average of 250 participants. According to organiser Renate Haegele, attending companies primarily used the fmx recruitment platform to build a talent pool from which they could later recruit staff for specific projects.
#Emmerich
The organisers reported that sessions on “Surf’s Up”, “Spider-Man 3” and “Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man’s Chest” attracted the largest audiences, along with director Roland Emmerich’s closing-day presentation on his view of visual effects and computer-generated imagery. The Digital Cinema Day, focused on the complete digital-cinema workflow and stereoscopy, and the Virtual Humans Forum on virtual actors also drew strong interest.
For the following year, the organisers planned changes to the conference format. Speakers would be invited to apply with proposed sessions to make topic selection more objective, and a two-day overlap with the Stuttgart International Festival of Animated Film was planned.
DIGITAL PRODUCTION covered the highlights of fmx/07 in issue 04:07.
